We performed a comparison between AWS CloudFormation and Chef based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Configuration Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The ability to manage devices with different sets of policies is most valuable."
"Intune's security features for Apple iOS and Mac OS are helpful. We can check enrollment, manage public and private settings, and manage the organization's data using security key features."
"Its protection policies are most valuable. It protects mobile devices as well as individual apps. It is pretty scalable, and its documentation is also pretty good. It is also pretty straightforward to deploy."
"The ability to switch between Affinity and non-Affinity enrollment is great."
"We use a local Active Directory, but we weren't able to manage all our on-site systems without a solution like Intune, and we needed to deploy software like VPNs and other things. It's seamless now to to this through Intune."
"The Asset Management and Auto Pilot are valuable features."
"The most valuable feature for us is the security, including risk analysis and patch management."
"It has improve our organization through the remote management of non-domain joined devices."
"The most valuable feature of AWS CloudFormation is the simple tracking of infrastructure."
"The integration of the solution is very good."
"Automations make it pretty easy to provision AWS, development, or deployment environments."
"The CloudFormation template can be reused to create multiple stacks, reducing duplications and improving our infrastructure."
"The reusability of the solution is valuable."
"The most beneficial aspect lies in its capability to handle input acquisition and assessment."
"With CloudFormation, there is no need to use complicated coding."
"CloudFormation gives us control of AWS and any Cloud infrastructure. It creates the whole stack for Cloud services technologies so it's easy to manage the whole system."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."
"Chef can be scaled as needed. The Chef server itself can scale but it depends on the available resources. You can upgrade specific resources to meet the demand. Similarly, with clients, you can add as many clients as you need. Again, this depends on the server resources. If the server has enough resources, it can handle the number of servers required to manage the infrastructure. Chef can be scaled to meet the needs of the infrastructure being managed."
"I wanted to monitor a hybrid cloud environment, one using AWS and Azure. If I have to provision/orchestrate between multiple cloud platforms, I can use Chef as a one-stop solution, to broker between those cloud platforms and orchestrate around them, rather than going directly into each of the cloud-vendors' consoles."
"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"There could be more wizard-driven policy development or creation. Some of the policies can get quite complex. If they have a wizard that assists the administrators in creating the policy, that will be a great job."
"It needs certificate provisioning for S/MIME purposes."
"They should make it easier to order it, however, that's generally true for everything from Microsoft."
"There is improvement needed in integrating with the installed Office solutions versions, such as Office 2019. The Office 365 integrates without a problem."
"I would like some integration with the Microsoft reporting platform Power BI."
"The configuration could be better by consolidating options and making it simpler."
"The synchronization could be improved."
"An issue we have run into with Microsoft Endpoint Manager is that we cannot patch third-party products like Adobe and Chrome with it."
"CloudFormation is not particularly good at handling cross-account dynamic references. If you try to refer to an object that CloudFormation has created in a separate AWS account, it tends to fall apart. That's because it is a byproduct of the multi-tenant configuration. This is the most glaring shortcoming in my perspective because you can't dynamically reference objects in other accounts that CloudFormation has created, but it is not a shortcoming that you can't overcome. This is the only pain point that I've come across that didn't have a workaround natively. Sometimes the confirmation is slow, and it could be faster. The downside to CloudFormation when you're fully embracing it is that the AWS services do not get released immediately fully CloudFormation enabled. If you need to use the latest AWS service that just got announced or reinvented, you're not going to be able to continue with CloudFormation for the first X number of months. This is because they develop the products separately, and then they hand it to the CloudFormation team, which later on develops a CloudFormation integration. So, if you need to be on the newest thing AWS has, CloudFormation is often going to be a constraint that prevents you from doing that."
"There could be better error handling. It would be a good way to improve the solution."
"The speed of the replication process could improve. It can take some time to replicate that could use a speed increase."
"The code we write in AWS CloudFormation is pretty big compared to Terraform. We need to have more modules in the solution. A library should also be there where we can save code lines. A dashboard feature would be good for designers."
"If Amazon could extend CloudFormation to other cloud platforms, that would be good. Currently, it is only limited to AWS."
"AWS CloudFormation allows you to use the code templates written in JSON and YAML, but not directly in Python. Adding this feature would be beneficial."
"The product should be made cloud-agnostic, allowing users to deploy the same environment with minimal tweaks across different cloud platforms, similar to Terraform. Additionally, it would be beneficial to have the ability to manage templates outside of the AWS environment."
"The solution must enable more hands-on designing of the templates."
"The time that it takes in terms of integration. Cloud integration is comparatively easy, but when it comes to two-link based integrations - like trying to integrate it with any monitoring tools, or maybe some other ticketing tools - it takes longer. That is because most of the out-of-the-box integration of the APIs needs some revisiting."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
"I would rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect. We have to go to IOD and stuff so they should consider things like this to make it a ten."
"It is an old technology."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
AWS CloudFormation is ranked 8th in Configuration Management with 28 reviews while Chef is ranked 16th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews. AWS CloudFormation is rated 8.4, while Chef is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of AWS CloudFormation writes "Pretty easy setup with great automations for provisioning that save time and money". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". AWS CloudFormation is most compared with AWS Systems Manager, Spring Cloud, Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Microsoft Configuration Manager, whereas Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, BigFix and SaltStack. See our AWS CloudFormation vs. Chef report.
See our list of best Configuration Management vendors.
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